The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community

Abstract

This chapter examines the role of women within the family as a source of social productivity, that is, of surplus value making. In pre-capitalist patriarchal society the home and the family were central to agricultural and artisan production. Women, children and the aged lost the relative power that derived from the family's dependence on their labor, which was seen to be social and necessary. In order to see the housewife as central, it was first of all necessary to analyze briefly how capitalism has created the modern family and the housewife's role in it, by destroying the types of family group or community which previously existed. The “unreliability” of women in the home and out of it has grown rapidly since then, and runs directly against the factory as regimentation organized in time and space, and against the social factory as organization of the reproduction of labor power.

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